SAN JOSE, California (AP) — With each update to its Office suite, Microsoft Corp. has piled on features aimed at boosting users’ productivity and spurring sales of the world’s most widely used collection of programs for handling documents, spreadsheets, e-mail and presentations.Office 2007 for Windows-based PCs, launched last week alongside the company’s new Windows Vista operating system, is no different, except for one feature that makes it vastly easier to figure out what these programs have to offer.

Most of the suite’s applications — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access — have done away with the old, familiar menus and toolbars. In their place is the Ribbon — a horizontal strip of screen real estate populated with tabs and icons grouped by function.

Want to add clip art to a Word document? Just click on the “Insert” tab and choose the “Clip Art” icon, which, incidentally, is hard to miss. Creating a complex formula in Excel? Click on “Formulas” and pick your poison — all broken down by type.

It is also dynamic: When handling a photo in Word, the Ribbon presents the tools suitable for that task. No more clicking on the “View” menu, choosing “Toolbars” and then figuring out which of the tiny icons might be of use.

The Ribbon ranks among the most significant improvements to Office to date. It is not the first software to break out of the “File,” “Edit,” and “View” mould, but it’s the most convincing alternative I have seen. Other programs will surely follow suit.

The Ribbon is not customisable and cannot be repositioned, though it can be minimised. There is no option to switch back to “classic” view, and it is not universal — the old menus and toolbars can be found in parts of Outlook, for instance.

It took me a few weeks to get used to it, but after trying out Office 2007 for a couple of months, the Ribbon has revealed features of the suite that I did not know existed.

The Ribbon is not the only enhancement. In many of the programs, when text is selected, a faint “Mini Toolbar” appears above it. Hover the mouse pointer over the toolbar, and you can change the formatting of the selected text. For those easily annoyed, it can be switched off.

Office 2007 also stores documents in a new format — one more compact and safer than before. Colleagues who have not upgraded must download a free converter program to open the files. You also can save files in the older formats with Office 2007 — important because the converter is not available yet for Apple Inc.’s Macintosh computers.

There is also a new way of adding graphics magic to your documents — once everyone upgrades. “SmartArt” allows you to easily insert graphics that can be easily edited and repositioned. If the typed-in text does not fit, it automatically shrinks the size of the font so that it does.

Some highlights of the core programs:

[bul] Word: Even the most boring document can be spiffed up quickly by applying several new themes. And you can get a preview — before committing with a click — simply by hovering over the theme with the mouse; you can quickly compare which one might look best. Word also has a new tool to instantly strip away any metadata, such as snarky comments thought hidden, that might have been attached as notes by people reviewing your work.

[bul] Excel: The popular spreadsheet can now handle a grid of 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns of data — a 16-fold increase in one direction, 64-fold in the other. Improved charting functionality supports 3-D, transparency and shadows. And when working with a large table, it keeps the headers in view when you scroll down.

[bul]>Outlook: In previous versions of Outlook, searching was possible but painfully slow. Outlook 2007 now supports “Instant Search,” letting you find old e-mail in seconds without a third-party program like Google Inc.’s Desktop search program.

[bul] PowerPoint: There’s good news for those of us who dread meetings where speakers rely too heavily on PowerPoint: A boatload of new templates helps jazz things up. It is easier to create the presentations, too, thanks to SmartArt and themes. A boring bulleted list, for instance, can be transformed into a diagram — such as timelines — with a click or two.

[bulB>Access: <$>Microsoft’s database program gets a much-needed infusion of user friendliness. A launch screen presents different tasks that can be handled by the program. And no longer must you wade through floating windows to create a form for collecting data or a report to present your results.

Of course, a big selling point, particularly for businesses, is how the Office programs work together. Microsoft also is updating its servers that act as the glue, enabling easier sharing of documents and information.